The summer tourist season is here again and visitors can already be seen arriving in this hill station. And the best place to see how many of them are here is the Mall Road, the lifeline of the town. Tourists as well as locals meet on the Mall and exchange news over a cup of tea or coffee at its innumerable cafeterias. It is once again time for crowds to gather on the Mall.
This is the only road in India which has experienced footfalls of eminent people like Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, GM Modi, Vinoba Bhave, Madan Mohan Malaviya, GD Birla,V Shantaram and Dilip Kumar. The list of VIPs and celebrities who have walked on this road is indeed long!
Driving up the thirty kilometres from the Doon Valley to Mussoorie, the traveller comes upon a point with a fork in the road a few miles before the end of the journey. He can either carry on straight or take a wide loop to the left. If he carries on straight he will end up at the Picture Palace end of Mussoorie.
But if the visitor decides that one more swinging loop to the left can really do no harm, he will end up at library Point or library Chowk, which no old timer will ever call by its other name- Gandhi Chowk. This is the point from where one road branches off towards the lal Bahadur Shastri Academy of National Administration (lBSNAA), Kempty Falls, Happy Valley and Clouds’ End.
If one reaches the Picture Palace end, one can walk the two kilometre stretch to library Point, down the twisting and turning historic two kilometre stretch known as the Mall Road, a name evocative of restaurants and cafes, souvenir shops, cinema halls, honeymooning couples, children on horseback.
Almost every hill station built by the British has a Mall- and even some other cities, including Delhi and Amritsar-but the Mall in Mussoorie is special. For the simple reason that it is the oldest, hitting 179 years now. In these long years it has seen a lot, from a time when it was open only to British gentry for their evening walks and their summer dalliances to the present day when every Indian tourist willing to make the journey is welcome to its sounds, scents and scenes.
It is in fact a Mirror of Mussoorie in which one can see all aspects of its present day existence and then, if one looks hard enough in a certain light, even its glorious past- in some of the old buildings, dating back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
After passing by the Picture Palace, the visitor sets off down the Mall at a leisurely pace, past the shops with their extended fronts crowded with sweaters, knitted caps and walking sticks. On weekends, even in off-season, the market on Mall Road is quite bustling with activity. The several small cafeterias and sweet shops begin preparing for breakfast time. Weekend tourists from Dehradun, the odd honeymoon couple and some foreigners can always be seen on the Mall, all the year round.
Walking forward on the historic boulevard, one comes across many shops, old and new, selling branded woollens which are in great demand by the foreign tourists, Tibetan artefacts, pastries, shoes, artificial jewellery and DVDs. The cinema halls including Rialto, Majestic and Vasu have closed down, changing the landscape of the road to a great extent. The old red, Clarke’s building, built in 1920, stands as good as new around the middle point of the Mall Road. Near this is the famous Chic Chocolate bakery which has catered to the locals and tourists for the past many decades. From here, one moves towards what is known as the "Kwality" corner of the Mall. The two-storeyed Kwality restaurant was replaced a few years ago by Café Coffee Day.
Yet downwards is the "Jhoolaghar, the place from where the trolleys (cable cars) leave for the Gun Hill. The trolley station is surrounded by several shops. Finally, one heads towards the library end of the Mall. The old Hakman’s Hotel,which was a hub of social activity in the 1960s and 70s, wears a very quiet look, but will soon be renovated and restored. One can already see people at work there.
Horses around the Hawa Ghar at the turn towards Camel’s Back Road used to wait for those who would take a pony ride. However, the horses have now vanished. The road has to be kept clean and the horses, I came to know, were preventing the Mall from remaining clean and odourless. Just a little bit away is the library Point where the old Mussoorie Public library, built in 1843 stands, housed in an attractive green building. Here ends one’s journey down the stately Mall.
Without the Mall, Mussoorie would never be the town it is.